A cook who can make five sauces can make five hundred dishes. Master a few building blocks.

Depth in a few fundamentals beats a shallow collection of recipes. Learn five sauces properly and you have not learned five things, you have learned a system you can recombine endlessly, because each one is a pattern rather than a destination. The same logic runs through chords, camera moves, joke structures and joints.

Choose three fundamentals in whatever you do and spend a month on only those. Make the same sauce, play the same four chords, light the same face until it is boring. The payoff shows up later, when something new turns out to be a combination you already own.